An Alaskan journalist's perspective on local and national issues

Posts tagged ‘2012 Elections’

In the world of stupid statements, this has got to be one of the best. For real, this couldn’t be any more stupid. When Ron Paul said that asinine quote about the churches and other people helping those without health insurance, that wasn’t nearly as stupid as Rick Santorum’s latest documented quote. Get a load of this –

The answer is not what can we do to prevent deaths because of a lack of health insurance. There’s — I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.

Wow. Just, wow. That’s powerful stupid. That’s like the kind of epic stupid that exists in books. You hear people talk about other people this dumb, but you never actually see them. Until now.

Basically, Santorum is arguing that nobody dies from medical causes. Hear me out. If nobody dies from not having health care coverage, that means that nobody dies from medical causes, because the only way that they could die from not having coverage is if they had a medical problem. That’s Santorum’s argument. And it’s stupid. People die from medical problems all the time.

According researchers from Harvard, roughly 45,000 deaths a year can be attributed to lack of health care. Over 2,000 veterans die each year from lack of health care. That’s something interesting. But the fact is that Santorum doesn’t stop at saying nobody dies from lack of health insurance.

He has always been quoted talking about how people without insurance need to stop whining about the high cost of medicine and advanced medical treatments and pay less on non-essential things like cable and cell phones. Yes, because all poor people have these things. He has also said that the insurance companies should deny coverage of people with pre-existing conditions. Isn’t this guy a peach?

While he is talking about how gay sex is wrong and how straight sex is good, he will also never stop finding ways to make the poor out to be the enemy. What a piece of human garbage. Santorum goes on to say –

People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to. And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.

Yes, they don’t go to doctors when they need to. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be because going to the doctor is ungodly expensive? Even seeing a family practitioner can be up at $100 a pop. At an emergency room, they will treat you, but only to the point where you are no longer in mortal danger. After that, they have satisfied their Hippocratic Oath and will kick you out, head-first.

And by the way, why is it that the government is required to do nothing? Apparently Rick and Ron didn’t read this Constitution that they all love so much. There is a claus in the First Amendment stating that all services that are deemed of national importance should be run by the government. It’s the reason that Republicans can’t privitize the Postal Service. But now we have more necessary services. Medicine should be one of them. Why it isn’t is simply beyond conception.

This man is so blind to the problems of the poor that he simply doesn’t care. Rick Santorum doesn’t care about poor people. It is clear that in his utopia, the poor would be living on the street or dead, with no tools available to help them, while the rich lived in golden paradises without taxes. What a pity such a world couldn’t exist.

It’s time to shut Rick Santorum down. It’s clear that he’ll say whatever his dim-witted base wants to hear. Is sad, really, because most of his base is poor middle to senior-aged white people. People who could use universal health care the most.

A recent article in Salon magazine kind of spells out a lot of what is happening right now in this country. The pro-life movement has always said that they are against abortion. They want to preserve life (how many of them eat meat?). But that argument is really falling by the waist-side when you think about it.

With new prescriptions being made, like the Morning-After Pill, Plan-B, and emergency contraceptions of all kinds, the fact is that with modern pharmaceuticals, it is getting so that abortions are less and less necessary. One would think that this would slow down the anti-choice (pro-life) activists, right? If there are no abortions happening, how can this be a problem?

In the article mentioned above, it talks about how Rick Santorum, the presidential candidate who came in only eight votes behind Romney is against birth control. All birth control. Here’s a quote from the man himself –

One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.

Add to that quote (from the article) –

Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.

So, how are things supposed to be? That’s an easy question to answer, when looking at Santorum’s religious affiliation. He is a hardcore and old-school Catholic. This means that he is one of the Catholic crowd who believe that any sex that isn’t missionary and for the express purpose of procreation is wrong. It is a telling sign of something that the pro-choice crowd doesn’t think about nearly enough.

It’s not enough that anti-choice individuals are against abortion. That at least makes a modicum of sense. As Bill Maher said –

I get that, I just don’t agree with it.

But this isn’t that. In fact, the disturbing part seems to be that the more options that are created to prevent having women to have to go through an abortion, the louder the opposition becomes. The question is – why? To answer it for Santorum, one must, unfortunately, look to his holy book.

According to Genesis 38: 8-10, the story goes that a man named Onan had a brother, but the brother died before he could bear offspring. In accordance with tradition, it was customary for the brother to have sex with his brother’s widow. However, when in the act of intercourse, he pulls out from her, and his “seed” fell to the ground. Of course, God got angry (he does that a lot) and struck the man down for his actions. Now, thanks to that verse, the Catholic church is of the mind that no sperm must be wasted. All sex must result in reproduction.

This brings us back to the current situation with Santorum. He is against all forms of contraception, even in the case of married couples. For real, if a couple doesn’t want to have kids, too bad! Not only is this non-sensical, but it is also wrong.

But one just has to ask – why? What possible good comes from this kind of ideology? This is more evidence that religion and state mixing always has negative consequences. Now we have a Presidential candidate who wants to get rid of any and all possible ways of practicing safe sex.

And the worst part is that he isn’t done there. There was a quote from Dan Savage on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

One of the things I’m constantly reminding people about Rick Santorum is that he doesn’t merely have an anti-gay agenda, he has an anti-straight agenda too.

Santorum is against gay marriage, against all forms of abortion (even in the case of rape and incest. Who knows, crazy as he is, maybe against saving the life of the mother too), against pornography. This guy is against sex. He is totally against sex. This is a problem, and it needs to be addressed, because the bigger societal question becomes – how did this guy get into public office? How did he become so powerful? How do people this deranged acquire so much political status?

America, we can do better, and we need to. Now, there is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Santorum isn’t going to win the primaries. He is too extreme for the majority of Republicans and right-leaning moderates. But this needs to be addressed.

We need to save our rights to have sex. Sex is fun. Protect it. Otherwise, we may not have any choices.